SUNY Press eBooks· 2025· Book chapter
Arts of the Contact Zone
- 1,004citations
- 2025year
Short summary
Children's emergent literacy is demonstrated through their playful, phonics-based decoding of baseball player names, such as "Many Trails" for Manny Trillo and struggling with "Carl Yastremski."
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Children aged six and seven demonstrated emergent literacy by decoding baseball player names.
- Phonics-based attempts at pronunciation included "Many Trails" for Manny Trillo.
- Difficulty was encountered with more complex names like Carl Yastremski.
- This represents an early, self-initiated use of literacy skills.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Whenever the subject of literacy comes up, what often pops first into my mind is a conversation I overheard eight years ago between my son Sam and his best friend, Willie, aged six and seven, respectively: “Why don’t you trade me Many Trails for Carl Yats . . . Yes, it’s . . . Ya-strum-scrum.” “That’s not how you say it, dummy, it’s Carl Yes . . . Yes . . . oh, I don’t know.” Sam and Willie had just discovered baseball cards. Many Trails was their decoding, with the help of first-grade English phonics, of the name Manny Trillo. The name they were quite rightly stumped on was Carl Yastremski. That was the first time I remembered seeing them put their incipient literacy to their own use, and I was of course thrilled.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. SUNY Press eBooks, 2025 · DOI ↗
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Field: Literature and Literary Theory
Literature and Literary TheoryArts and Humanities